有些游戏是由更小的游戏制成，比如《Wii Sports》或《全面战争》。在其他的游戏中，更小的游戏间的分隔性不那么明显。《侠盗猎车手》（游戏邦注：下文简称GTA）中的汽车驾驶感觉与步行完全不同，但是从本质上来说，GTA是两款紧密连接的游戏。

当游戏相互融合时，它们能够产生令人兴奋的全新体验，但是还有许多融合无法发挥作用。它们的互动并没有使游戏体验得到提升，这些游戏之间互相拉扯，使得整体体验与原先设想的协同作用背道而驰。

或许是因为游戏设计忽略了玩家角色的重要性。角色不是个营销问题，而是玩家如何理解你的游戏以及为何他们觉得游戏极富吸引力的原因。

侠盗猎车手：罪恶都市(from chinagamedown.com)

玩家的角色

当你在玩一款游戏时，你不是舞台上的演员，也不是一部自导自演电影中的明星。你将融入游戏世界中并成为其中的一部分，通过这个部分来做出行动。

问题在于，你属于哪一部分？

在之前的博文中，我将此称为“玩家的玩偶”。玩偶是玩家在游戏中直接控制的东西，可以是人类、汽车、上帝之手等。甚至可能是完全看不到的东西。比如，《俄罗斯方块》中旋转方块的那只手就是个看不见的玩偶。

玩偶纯粹是个功能化的概念。但是，角色指的是这些功能的具体情况。尽管从技术上来说，玩偶可以被设定成人和东西，但是在实际操作中玩家需要某些线索看断定他们在游戏中扮演何种角色。

我看到经验不足的游戏设计师所犯的普遍错误是缺乏鲜明的角色。有时出现这种问题的原因在于，开发者在考虑故事或驱动力时将问题复杂化了。或者是因为开发者对游戏成形后的样子已经有了想法，比如含有大量有趣的部分和成就，然后尝试从最终开始进行设计。

这样的设计通常产生的后果是，设计师设想的角色与玩家设想的角色有所差异。

鲜明的角色能够帮助玩家看到游戏的框架，从而制定出可能获得胜利的最佳做法。而模糊不清的角色不会为玩家提供任何信息，让他们无法察觉游戏的乐趣所在。

从这个方面上来说，角色与玩家在纸笔游戏中所扮演的角色完全没有关系。与它们相关的是愿景、背景和玩家的自信心。

优秀角色的6大标准

在电视剧中，因为所处情况本质的不同，某些角色类型会比其他的要好。比如，侦探、医生和律师经常在各种场景中出现，因为他们是那类遇见许多人并且在观众能够识别的境况中处理基本问题（游戏邦注：比如生活和自由）的职业人士。

游戏中的角色也会受到情况的限制。优秀的游戏角色需要定义出明确的能力，以便展开行动。如果没有这么做，那么就是个劣质的角色。

并非所有的角色都同样有趣，也并非所有角色都会定义出优秀的游戏。所以我们经常会看到许多原型角色不断重复，而且某类角色不断衍生出劣质游戏。

这其中的要点在于，角色是否能够为行动服务。如果玩家可以使用角色来做出行动改变世界，那么就是个好角色。否则，相反的角色就会给你带来许多问题。

我使用6个标准来评估角色是否能够在游戏设计中发挥作用。理想状况下，角色应该满足所有6大标准，但是满足4个至少足够你步入正轨。这6大标准是：始终如一的优势地位；单个类型的可扩展玩偶；明确的目标；自然产生压力；持续性的动作；易用性背景。

让我们依次来阐述这6个标准：

幕府将军:全面战争(from clanlong.com)

优势地位：始终如一的优势地位指的并非固定的镜头。要点在于让你理解自己是否正在做出动作或指挥其他人。在《幕府将军：全面战争》中，你的角色是既要规划国家间高层次的战略游戏又要指挥战场中的战斗。这两种模式从本质上来说是相同的优势地位，所以它们能够紧密配合。但是，却不能将它们与真正的打斗引擎相结合。

单个类型的可扩展玩偶：玩家和玩偶类型中维持始终如一的关系可以让游戏的体验更加自然。在《星际争霸》中，所有你能够指挥的单位都是相同类型玩偶的变体，《Gran Turismo》中所有汽车都衍生自同一个基本车辆玩偶。在《光晕》中，Master Chief经常在步行和乘坐汽车间转变。这两类游戏采用的都是同种类型的玩偶。

目标：玩家是否需要杀死所有东西，建造某些令人惊叹的东西，或者成为世界上最大的统治者？具体内容是什么？目标对角色的定义就如同角色对目标的定义，一个越清晰，另一个也越清晰。

像“结婚”之类模糊不清且没有明确实现方式的目标通常会削弱角色。《侠盗猎车手：圣安地列斯》中的次级游戏正属于此类。

自然的压力：当Jack Palance邀请引导人捡起枪支时，引导人的角色就变得清晰起来。在城市模拟游戏中，你自然知道需要处理火灾、犯罪、污染、居民抱怨和政府预算等问题。这些内容在游戏背景下都是很自然的内容。

有时你会因某些原因而打破自然压力，就像《传送门2》这款游戏那样。但是，不可持续性地打破自然压力。

持续性的动作：即清晰的动作。它们也需要持续在角色身上发生。在战斗游戏中，场景期盼玩家能够击打敌人，而不是与他们交谈。在侦探游戏中，可能又是另一种方法。当角色不清晰时，可能导致大量个人动作设计彼此分离，没有任何关系。

持续性动作是所有标准中最为重要的部分。使用古怪且与主游戏不同的迷你游戏固然很有趣（游戏邦注：比如在《荒野大镖客》中玩纸牌），但是即便这样也要让这些小游戏与主线路相关。

易用性背景：最后，角色需要以玩家可以联系起来的行为作为基础。你应当了解市场以及用户消费的媒体类别，因为易用性需要玩家已经熟知的概念。极客玩家可以理解剑盾游戏创意，但是40多岁的中年家庭主妇做不到。

易用性也正是许多功能性的趣味游戏想法无法找到用户的原因，比如股票市场模拟游戏。这也是为何某些更为费解的游戏能为记者和其他热心粉丝钟爱的原因，比如《Psychonauts》。

你是否了解玩家的角色

如果你了解部分内容或知道游戏是多个角色的结合，那么就回到游戏设计中将其简化，让玩家所处角色在你脑海中更加清晰。

如果你的游戏玩家需扮演某个12世纪的和尚在寺院中用手势来抄写文字，那么你应当重新思考这个内容，制作些更具易用性的内容。

角色不只是个营销或品牌问题。玩家通过角色来理解你为他们构建的世界以及为何这个世界如此令人惊叹。如果他们无法理解自己的角色，那么你做的所有工作可能也都是毫无用处的。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Do Your Players Know Their Role?

Some games are made of smaller games, like Wii Sports or the Total War games. Other separations are softer. Vehicle play in Grand Theft Auto feels quite different from on-foot, and GTA is essentially two games which link strongly.

When games mix they can create exciting new experiences, but many mixes just don’t work. Rather than being enhanced by their interaction, these games pull on each other, leaving the overall experience to be one of dysnergy, the opposite of synergy.

Perhaps the game design has forgotten the importance of the player’s role. Role is not a marketing issue. It is how players understand your game and why it’s awesome.

You Play A…

When you play a game you are not an actor taking to the stage, nor a star of your own personal movie. You are projecting yourself into a world, inhabiting some part of it and through that part taking action.

The question is: What part?

In a previous post I labelled this the player’s doll. The doll is the thing (or things) in the game over which the player exercises direct control. It might be a human figure, a car, a hand of god, anything. It might even be totally invisible. The hand that twists the tetrominos in Tetris, for example, is an invisible doll.

The doll is a purely functional concept. Role, on the other hand, is about the context of those functions. While a doll can technically be programmed to do just about anything, in practise the player needs some sort of clue as to who or what they are supposed to be in the game.

A common problem that I see in fledgling game designs is a lack of a clear role. Sometimes this is because the developer has over-complicated the issue by thinking in terms of story or motivations. Alternatively it’s because the developer has an idea of what the game is supposed to look like at its end, with lots of interesting parts and achievements and so on, and has tried to backtrack from the end to the beginning design-wise.

Such designs usually have a yawning gap between what they are supposed to be versus what the player is supposed to do.

A clear role helps the play brain see the frame of the game, and so figure out what the optimal path to win might be. It gives the player a series of conventions to toy with, and helps establish whether actions feel natural or arcane. An opaque or hazy role, on the other hand, tells the player nothing and makes him very unsure of why the game is supposed to be fun. He might toy with it but find it hard to connect or care about.

Role in this sense is nothing at all to do with character or roleplaying in the pen-and-paper sense. They are about perspective, context and player confidence.

Six Criteria of a Good Role

In television drama, some character types are better than others because of the nature of their situation. Detectives, doctors and lawyers, for example, return in endless variations because they are the kinds of professions that meet many people and deal with fundamental issues (life and liberty) in situations that the audience can recognise.

Roles in games are also constrained by situation, but physically rather than dramatically. A good game role has to revolve around the tangible ability to take action. If it doesn’t, then it’s a bad role.

Not all roles are equally interesting nor make for good games. There is a reason why we often see several archetypal roles repeated, and why – despite the hopes of many a keen observer – certain kinds of role consistently make for weak games.

It comes down to whether the role is one that lends itself to clear actions. If the player can use it to pull on obvious levers to change the world, then it’s good. Those kinds of roles lead to good tests, and a perception of fairness. If not, you’re in trouble.

There are six criteria that I use in evaluating whether a role will work in a game design or not. Ideally all six should be satisfied, but if you have at least four of them right then you’re probably on the right track. The criteria are: A consistent vantage point; A single type of extensible doll; An unambiguous set of goals; A natural source of pressure; A consistent set of actions; An accessible context.

Let’s look at these in turn:

Vantage Point: A consistent vantage point does not mean a fixed camera perspective so much as a fixed sense of where you sit within the game. You understand whether you are taking action or commanding others, and that defines much about the role. In Shogun Total War your role covers both a high-level strategy game across the nation and a lower-level command on the battlefield. These two modes are essentially the same vantage point, so they fit together well. Mixing them with an actual combat engine would not, however.

Single Type of Extensible Doll: Maintaining a consistent relationship between the player and type of doll is what makes a game a natural experience. In Starcraft, all the units that you command are variants on a single type of doll, and in Gran Turismo all cars are variants on a basic car doll. In Halo the Master Chief often transitions between being on foot or being in a vehicle. These two game modes are explained through one being an extension of the other’s doll.

Goals: Is the player supposed to kill everything, build something awesome, become the greatest mayor in the history of history? What exactly? The goals define the role as much as the role defines the goals, so the clearer one is, the clearer the other also is.

Something vague like ‘get married’ with no clear way to do that usually weakens the role. The relationship sub-games in GTA: San Andreas or Fable are unsatisfying distractions from the main games because they are well outside the hit-things-shoot-stuff role that the games have established.

Natural Pressure: When Jack Palance invites the shepherd to pick up the gun, the role of the shepherd is clear. A city simulation is one in which you expect to deal with fires, crime, pollution, population gripes and budgets. They are natural in that context. Not species evolution, dungeon adventures or a sudden change to a first person action section though.

There are moments when you can break from the convention of natural pressure for thaumatic purposes. Portal 2’s end – which I won’t spoil – breaks from the natural pressure of the test format in spectacular fashion, and it works because of what it has been building on. Constantly breaking natural pressure, on the other hand, is a big no-no.

Consistent Actions: Actions to be clear. They also need to be consistent with the role. In a beat-‘em-up you expect to hit things, not talk to them. In a detective game it’s the other way around. When a role is unclear it leads to a lot of designs of individual actions, even whole sub-games, that bear no relation to each other.

Consistent actions are the most important of all the criteria. Sure it’s fun to depart from the main game with the odd mini-game (playing Poker in Red Dead Redemption perhaps) but even they should feel as though they belong.

Accessible Context: Finally the role needs to be based on an activity to which the player can relate. Know your market and the kinds of media that it consumes, because accessibility is about concepts with which the player is already somewhat familiar. Geeky gamers get the whole swords and sorcery idea, whereas mid-40s housewife gamers do not. Agatha Christie fans love an object finding game because the context makes sense to them, but not to sports fans.

Accessibility is why many functionally interesting game ideas, like stock market simulators, never find an audience. It’s also why some more obscure games that journalists and other enthusiastic fans love, like Psychonauts, never connect with the audience outside their particular bubble.

So Do You Know Their Role?

If your answer is you know some of it, or a bit of it, or it’s a combination of a couple of roles then stop. Go back and simplify it. Get it clear in your head.

If your answer is that the player plays a twelfth century monk transcribing texts in a monastery using gestural gameplay then stop. Go back and rethink that context. Make something more accessible instead.

Role is not just a marketing or a branding issue. It is through the role that players understand the world you have made for them and why it is awesome. If they can’t get with the role, then all your other work is probably futile. (Source: What Games Are)